The Cybrarian Voyager column Thursday, October 17, 1996

Subject: Canadian Internet Sites -- 2. NetNotes.

By RICHARD ANDERSON

Continuing the thread of the last column, here are a few more Canadian sites. A year ago, the federal government was just beginning to think about getting on the Internet. Now it has a large presence on the World Wide Web, at http://canada.gc.ca. Almost every department and agency is represented. One of the first things to be seen on this bilingual site is the Government Electronic Directory Service. Not yet comprehensive, it does provide name, title, address, telephone and fax numbers, and position within the public service hierarchy of an individual. Curiously, there are as yet no E-mail addresses for those listed.

Clicking on "About Canada" leads to interesting historical and geographical information. One link is to the National Library's "Canadian Information by Subject" home page (http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/caninfo/ecaninfo.htm). This has a subject approach based on the public libraries' Dewey Decimal System, or an alphabetical index. Most of the links are to organizations, governmental, private, or business, but there are also a few individual pages that collect Canadiana of one sort or another.

There is now a bilingual site for Hansard -- the record of Canada's parliamentary debates, at http://www.parl.gc.ca/cgi-bin/hansard/e_hansard_master.pl. It includes an index by subject, or MP of all the proceedings. Unfortunately, the index is not as simple to use as one might wish. This is because it's a direct transfer of the printed page index, and often on the Web you must "page" down several computer screens before the correct reference is found.

The best Web pages get around this problem by breaking up printed pages into screenfuls of information, to speed up access. In this case it's even worse -- there are subsections of pages (that must be clicked on from the bottom of an indexed link that you have gone to) in which your subject may be hidden. This is really making the poor surfer work hard to dig out information that could be found much more quickly in a printed index.

To solve the first problem, wait until a linking page is fully loaded, then use the Netscape "Find" buttton, (or Internet Explorer's equivalent) and retype the word or words you searched on, to locate where exactly they occur. There is no way around the "link within a link" problem, short of the site's creators abandoning the traditional printed page index and using a true search engine. Even the Parliamentary Business and Publications Search Engine, also found on the Hansard index page, will not take you any deeper into the proceedings than the index itself does.

Schoolnet http://schoolnet2.carleton.ca is a major Canadian site that has been favourably received abroad as well. It has links by province, by subject area, or by special projects. Among the New Brunswick links is one to N.B. TeleEducation (http://tenb.mta.ca), which offers distance education courses on subjects from computers to history to starting a home business. An example of a special topic can be found in MathMania http://csr.uvic.ca/~mmania.

NetNotes:

• Michael McCafferty, an expatriate New Brunswicker now living in Saskatchewan, has a useful web site on politics -- Canadian, American, British, and many others, at http://www.sasknet.com/~mmccaff. One of his Canadian links, at http://www.io.org/~alexng/can.html has connections to websites for parties in every province. But both New Brunswick's Liberals and Progressive Conservatives seem to be stuck in a time warp -- their sites have not been updated since the 1995 election.
• The City of Fredericton now has its own bilingual and fairly extensive Web site, at http://www.city.fredericton.nb.ca, with an E-mail address for the mayor (woodsideb@city.fredericton.nb.ca).
• Information on the merger between Maritime Internet Services and NBTel's NBNet can be seen at http://switch.mis.ca. Apparently new NBNet subscribers will get the same three months free deal now on offer to those who buy an Internet-ready computer.
• A Saint John company has produced an "Internet Suite" called Gulliver's Guardian, which incorporates Netscape as a browser, while allowing parents to block access to inappropriate sites as well as establish time restrictions on multiple accounts of junior surfers. E-mail, news groups and a central "scrapbook" to store each person's bookmarks, downloaded files and E-mail addresses are provided. See http://www.gulliver.nb.ca for more details.
• As noted in the last column, the name Internet Voyager has had to be changed, owing to another, pre-existing publication going on the Web. The new name is Cybrarian Voyager, which conforms to the original intent of describing the travels of a librarian on the Internet.

Richard Anderson, MLS, is a librarian/cybrarian. Your comments are invited. Send E-mail to: voyager@nbnet.nb.ca, letters to: 596 Charters Settlement Rd., Charters Settlement, N.B. E3C 1X8. Copyright (C) 1996 Richard Anderson. All rights reserved. May be reproduced in any medium for non-commercial purposes,so long as attribution is given.

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